February Ladies' Sweater Challenge

Really it's me challenging myself to actually complete knitting one thing for myself. 

Normally I knit small things such as doll or baby sweaters.  Mittens and hats are my speed, and even some scarves and shawls.  Not too big an investment of time because I tend to get bored before they're finished.  Right now I'm looking at my yarn stash and I can see three or four works in progress that need some sort of finishing.  One just needs the side seams sewn, for goodness sake!  You'd think I could do that much...

So when I found Ravelry.com, and all of those lovely project photos, many with FREE patterns available for the download, I said to myself -- YOU can do this!  Start to finish, maybe not in one calendar year, but before you're too old to wear a nice sweater, you CAN knit one!  An adult size!  Come ON -- just do it!

I cast on the starting number of stitches and happily knit along in garter stitch (knitting every row, right and wrong sides), doing the increases to turn the corners at each of the raglan sleeve lines.

Once it got large enough to get my arms through what will be the sleeves, I started the lace pattern.  It's over four rows and seven stitches.  The pattern forms these nice leaves.

Of course there was a problem from the get-go, because I could not get my fingers to do the left-leaning decrease.  Knit two together?  No problemo!!  But slipping and back loops and psso and all that jazz, I couldn't do it while counting rows and stitches, so I just knit two together for every decrease.  The pattern looks just a tiny bit different than the actual knitting, but if anyone is close enough to see that, we had better be engaged!

Then of course there was the error or should I say there were multiple errors knit in.  And Frog Stitching (ripit, ripit) and reknitting.  I swear I should have the lace pattern memorized, since I knit so much of it!!

Then there was the hole, and the tear down... I pulled out 21 rows of the seven stitches where I did the yarn-over above the other yarn-over and knit in a gigantic hole.  Yes, lace IS holes, but this one dwarfed the others around it!

big hole... just begging everyone to look at it!!

Preparing to un-knit 21 rows of the pattern so I could reknit them on some short needles.

I reknit the offending 7 times 21 stitches, carefully counting rows, and turning my work so the purl rows on the wrong side would be knit as purls.  When I got back to the top, I should have been ready to knit those seven in pattern.  I should have ended on a purl row.  Seven purl stitches, no yarn-overs in the bunch.

I did not.

Instead I had a knit row, with knit tog's and yo's.

Oh dang!

If you look very closely you can see right in the center of this picture where the pattern takes a slight jog; everything looks good to the left, and it looks good to the right, but down the center, not so much.

At this point, it was after 10 p.m.  I decided that I was taking a bigger risk tearing those stitches out again and redoing them a third time than just leaving the whole mess alone.  After all, will anyone notice it while I'm galloping by on a horse?  Or is it if THEY are galloping by on a horse?

Regardless, I am leaving in the booboo.  Only God is perfect, and I am not going to try to pretend otherwise!

Besides, I have only about 4 inches to go before I'm done with the sweater body and can get started on the sleeves.

These items are soooo much easier to knit...

Have a great day!  Knit on...

Post #325!

Wow, I didn't realize I had written so much!  Of course it feels like I just started doing this...

Friday was a work holiday, and if you read my blog last week you know I took some vacation days on Wednesday and Thursday.

On Wednesday, Miss E came over with her sewing machine (Rachel, the famous Babylock) and she learned how to wind bobbins, thread the machine and sew a 1/4 inch seam.  She laid out her 5 inch black, brown and gray blocks and put together the center of a small lap quilt.  She got as far as sewing on the first border, and she has a second chosen but not sewn on. 


She kept saying "Is my face in the picture?  It's not, is it?"

I also taught her how to use a ruler and rotary cutter to square things up.

Thursday we took Aunt Zel to Joann's and bought some yarn to fix a run in one of Miss E's sweaters.  Then we hit the Goodwill store and picked up a bag of cotton tee shirts because we wanted to try bleach stamping.

This is an easy way to embellish tees with rubber stamps and bleach.  I saw it first on one of my favorite blogs, Hanging By A Needle and Thread.  Here's a link: 

http://hangingonbyaneedleandthread.blogspot.com/2015/06/stamping-with-bleach.html

This is a gray shirt that turned pink after bleach hit it.

This one faded but didn't change color.

Miss E's shirt surprised us all, dark blue turned orange-red.

Our crew chief, Miss A

We used plastic bin lids to keep the bleach on the front, and clean rubber stamps from our art box.  You need paper towels, bleach and water, and damp clean tee shirts.  We laid them on the grass to dry when we were done.  I only paid $3 per shirt, so if we didn't like the results, we could toss them with no guilt whatsoever!

I tried doing some work in my sewing studio, but other than moving stuff around and refolding yardage, not much was accomplished.

However, on Friday, Miss A and I were picked up by my friend Suzi for some exciting Retail Therapy.  Originally we were doing Ben Franklin Crafts and some resale shops, but decided to start with Quil-tagious, a new-to-me shop in Mukwonago.  It's actually been open for about a year.  A friend of my cousin Nancy opened it with her sister or sisters... and Nancy said it was cool.

It was!  They had a whole wall of Kaffe Fassett prints.  I succumbed immediately...

and picked up a selection.  Love the red, purple and teal combination, and the big splashy florals and 'suggestion-of-florals' that are his trademark.  He's not afraid of color, and I love that!

Friday night at family sewing night we made some additional fidget blankets for Shelley's nursing home.  By the time we got home to bed Miss A was too tired to watch the fireworks that were going off it seemed like just outside our windows.

So yards into the stash far outstripped yards out this week.  I bought 6-7 yards at Quil-tagious plus a half roll jelly, and 8 or so more at Ben's.  I did find some fat quarters that felt rather patriotic...

and some insane dots!!

 

These will make some awesome bindings...

 

Next post might be about my crazy knitting fiasco.

 

Sew on...

 

 

Keeping Busy With the Holiday Coming Up!

I'm so crazy busy this week you'd think I was trying to take vacation.

Oh, wait, I am... Since Independence Day is Saturday, my office is closed on Friday.  So I decided to make it a five day weekend and take off Wednesday and Thursday.  That's great, except you know you pay for vacation BEFORE you go, and again AFTER.  Murphy's Law, or office humor, or maybe both.

What I plan to do this weekend is get some more of my UFOs done, do a little socializing, and a little shopping and crafting with the grands.  My friend Suzi and I are planning an adventure on Friday when she's also off work; we're going fabric shopping and thrifting.

I have to finish up a batch of rhubarb jam.  I already made one batch, but a new bag of stalks showed up at church on Sunday.  It was small and very light in color, so there weren't a lot of takers.  The woman who brought it encouraged me to take it rather than just leave it sitting since most folks had left. 

This is a picture of some from my first batch.  Oh my gosh is it good. 

The recipe is a modification of a freezer jam recipe I found on Pinterest.  I used sugar for the 'sweat' of the rhubarb, added some strawberries, cooked it down and thickened it with strawberry Jello.  I used sugar free Jello instead of the regular.  I was worried that it required actual sugar for thickness but it turned out fine.

I have the pink quilt top to finish.  I trimmed the sides into a rectangle... I'm just not into square quilts I guess!

The color is more like this... the other photo is too 'red'.

I trimmed off portions of either side panel to get a 42 inch by 48 inch rectangle.

And I'm still knitting on the February Ladies Sweater... maybe that will be done by Christmas.  Still it's for myself so there's no rush, and it's something to do while helping hubby watch bad TV.

So the girls and I will be gallivanting for a few days.  We're going to Goodwill to buy some tee shirts because we want to try bleach painting, and we'll visit the local library because I have books on hold.

Here's a link to a site a friend sent me -- you will enjoy it:

http://mellysews.com/2015/04/8-things-people-who-sew-wish-everyone-else-knew.html

Sew on...

UFO Green Sweater Update

I've been trying to figure out the weather in Wisconsin this spring/summer, but let's face it, it's Wisconsin we're talking about here... if you don't like the weather, just wait a few minutes, it's bound to change.

We had a spate of hot, muggy days, and the air conditioners have been working overtime.  I have the 'corporate sweater' at work, and at home I just fill my lap with some knitting and I'm good.

The lace on the February Lady's Sweater has been making me a little crazy lately, but I finally figured out where my errors were, and I think I have the pattern memorized now.

Remember the beginning?

Then there was the error and the frog stitching...

 

And the restart and the corrected lace...

 



and now we're into real progress:

This last group of pictures is from yesterday evening...I've got nearly 8 inches of lace, and of course it's not blocked yet, but I'm almost at waist level!  It's got to go another five or six inches, and then I can start on the sleeves.

My only regret was not putting buttonholes into the right side.  I was so furiously concentrating on the lace and the frogging and the reknitting that I lost track of them.  I'll find a toggle button or two, make loops, and say I planned it that way from the start.  Only my ardent followers will know differently! 

Happy Friday.  Knit on...

UFOs -- Again!

I've been trying to finish things up and move them off my list, both at work and at home.  I'm enjoying a bit of success at both places... feeling rather virtuous about the work pile (although it never seems to get any smaller, people keep sneaking things into it), but I'm really excited about the 'home' pile!

While at my aunt's one Friday, I was assigned with my cousin Amy to sort through four large black trash bags of donations from another cousin, who got them maybe from her mother-in-law or grandmother-in-law, I'm not entirely sure.  Non-sewers just classify anything as 'material', so we were unsure of what we would find.

I should have taken a picture of our process but didn't.  We opened the first bag and found things that were suitable for small projects like doll clothes and things that could be used in quilts and a LOT of stuff that just needed to be tossed back in the trash.  We also found many sets of the pieces of raglan tee shirts, kid sized, already cut out and with a piece of ribbing attached.  Those were interesting...

We culled down four bulging bags to two bags, each about half full, one for Amy and one for me.  No one else wanted anything.

I found a set of nine square hemmed cloths, five of which had embroidery on one edge.  No one except I knew what they could be...although some of them made good guesses.  There were also two skeins of floss.

The squares had hand picked hems with beautifully mitered corners.  There were two red, two green, and one white linen embroidered with a three-barred cross, and two purple and two blue with the aforementioned floss.

Have you guessed?

Now they are not quite as fancy as the altar cloths above, but I'm sure they were intended for such a use.  Our church has a preschool with a small altar that is used for both preschool and Sunday School activities, and it only had one cloth, a plain blue one, that is on it all year.  These various colors would be great to use to match the season in church.  I asked the preschool director if she'd use them if they were finished.  She said she would be thrilled to have them, but doesn't embroider.

I do!  Last week Saturday while Miss A was in the pool, I sat at the patio table and worked on them.  I used these plastic q-frames that I had in my resource center.  They hold well and don't mark up the project.

 The floss was already provided!

I measured the location and size of the existing crosses on the red cloth, and used a white quilt marker to draw in the lines.  The crosses are four inches in height and width, with about 3/8" between the bars.  The embroidery is a simple running stitch.

I like this frame, it's easy to hold, even for someone with arthritis, and the sewing went quickly.  I finished up while watching TV on Saturday night, and delivered the package on Sunday morning.

Another UFO crossed off the list, even if it wasn't mine originally!  But I'm still counting it.

Sew on...

Pink-a-liciousness

I have never been a fan of pink.

My mom loved pink... loved it to the point that one of the houses we lived in had a pink bathroom!  In a household of 10 where seven of them were male, and there was only ONE bathroom, this was a revolutionary choice.

She paired the pink walls, shower curtain and curtains with pink/brown/beige one inch tiles on the floor and chocolate brown rugs.  It was stunning.

My sister and I shared a room.  Mom wanted to paint it pink, and I wanted to paint it any color but pink.  We compromised with lavender, sister being too small to have an opinion at the time.  I picked out a white chenille bedspread with some pink flowers and all was happy for a time.

My apartment after high school graduation was whatever anyone gave me or I found at the Goodwill.  Who knew from decorating in the 70's?  Everything was psychedelic anyway.

My house is now decorated in neutrals and blues, except for the den which is sage green.  The carpeting is all medium warm beigey-brown.  It's all very restful.  I have splashes of red and green everywhere.  I like to change up the accent colors seasonally, but it needs to remain peaceful on the eyes or I get cranky. 

Why the color treatise?  Well, last week, I posted about a scrap project, and it was all PINK.  Mostly because Miss A and I were playing with the scraps.

I wanted to make a quilt I saw in either a Modern Quilting magazine or on a website devoted to modern quilting, I can't recall.  The quilt I saw was blue tiny blocks and a gray background.  Very muted, lots of negative space and quilted expertly in the gray.

Enter my very scrappy very bright pink patches, a first attempt at this pattern.  Only now that the panels are done, I needed to find something for the two strips on either side.

Sadly, my pink bin is very small and contains small pieces.  The smaller of the two panels measured 51 inches, so I need about a yard and three eighths.  No luck

Off we go to Joann's.  Miss E and I went on Sunday while the guys were watching a very long golf tournament and the smaller kids were in the pool with Auntie Heather.  I wanted a lighter pink, and Miss E agreed. After several auditions, we decided the solids were just not right.

We ended up with this

It will be seen as a solid from four feet away, or as my aunties always say "galloping by on a horse".  I will lay it out this week and see what it looks like in real life, and if necessary I can always go to the local quilt shop and look for a better solid color.  This will make a decent back if that happens.

You know it's funny, I don't have any pink clothing except for maybe some pajamas, but I do love pink yarn!

LOL!

Sew on...

UFO Update

I know without a doubt that I have too much stash. I probably don't need to buy another shred of fabric or another zipper or another hank of elastic ever. 

Probably.

I also know that for a confessed fabraholic, need rarely enters into the acquisition of anything.  I sometimes think I could find a perfectly adequate combination of fabrics if I just stopped being so fussy about the right green or the right blue, but what would be the fun of that?

I found a piece of flag fabric that might do with the red/white/blue UFO from yesterday's post.  The center has a lot of navy and a small amount of lighter blue.  The flag has a lighter blue.  Not great up close but with a small beige inner border, not bad:

Here are some other things I'm working on to use up all the bits and pieces.

 

I saw this idea in a modern quilt magazine... these two panels would make two quilts.  You find a solid or something that looks like a solid, the length must equal the length of the pieced panel.  Then you cut it lengthwise, at approximately 18 inches.  You now have two pieces, 18" by length of panel, and 25-27" by length of panel.  The panel goes in the center.  Viola!  Modern quilt.

 

Sadly, my stash of pinks is all small pieces.  <sigh>  A shopping trip is in my future.  At least I can come up with some acceptable backing choices!

 

I used the two inch strips in my bin to make strip sets for the chevron quilt I did a while back.  A year (or two?) ago I made two quilts using the "Jacks" pattern above for a lady at work who was having twins. The same sized pieces were used in both quilts.  I had leftovers of each.  Ergo, more Jacks. This one just needs a wildly colored border.  I have that chosen, I just need to decide on a style.  The back is going to be green.  Green goes with anything!

 

This panel is leftover bits from my daughter's quilt -- blue strings on the left, and blue and brown Friendship Stars on the right.  The plan is to make more panels and add them with a plain strip between ever addition.  As long as they're blue or brown, and the same length, they should work.  The actual quilt will have the strips going horizontally, but I can't get the picture to rotate.

 

This panel operates under the theory of 'if I sew them together, they go together'.

This doesn't even make a small dent in the stash pile, but it does clear out about a third of the UFOs.  Wish me luck.

 

Sew on...